Friday, August 26, 2011

Christina Aguilera Takes It on the Real Estate Chin

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: It may have taken more than three years and a handful of heavy-duty price chops but recently divorced pop music super star turned reality tee-vee singing contest judge Christina Aguilera has finally sold her former bachelorette pad high above the Sunset Strip. A kindly snitch we'll call Nathaniel Needsyoutoknow quietly informed Your Mama the sleek contemporary recently went for the dizzyingly complicated price of $4,653,815.

MizAguilera purchased the 4 bedroom and 7 crapper crib in the Bird Streets 'hood back in April 2003 for an even-Steven $5,000,000. A few quick flicks of the well-worn beads on Your Mama's bejeweled abacus reveals the dirrty girl's designer pocketbook and real estate ego took a $346,185 hit on the property not counting the fat real estate fees that easily ran in excess of $150,000. Certainly MizAguilera can safely weather a half million dollar financial storm but still, let's be honest pets, it's never a good day to lose half a million bucks even if you're a money-making showbiz machine like MizAguilera.

Celebrity real estate watchers and Xtina fans the world over already the highly stylized and sometimes misbehaveddivorcée has been trying to off-load this property since April 2008 when she first hoisted the Steve-Hermann-designed house on the open market with an asking price of $7,995,000.

Listing information shows the many-angled modern manse weighs in at more than 6,500 square feet of interior space with vast banks of floor-to-ceiling glass that powerfully reveal the seductive and unobstructed city views that go for as far as the eye can see and the smog allows. A built in sofa in the sunken living area curls around a futuristic fireplace with trapezoidal stainless steel chimney breast. Boozers and liquor lovers like Your Mama will appreciate the L-shaped built-in bar–the kind with actual bar stools–tucked into an architecturally dramatic corner of the main living/entertaining area. Terrazzo floors run under foot, glass sliders open the room up to the outdoors, and up above a vaulted wood beamed ceiling pierced by sky lights and a long row of clerestory windows entices ambient light into the airy area.

A more intimate living area–a den or a family room, if y'all will allow us to call it that–has glossy wood floors, massive pitched sky lights and a full wall of floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors that look out to a sliver of a patio and a brutalizing stacked stone wall that–in pictures–induces a discomforting kind of real estate claustrophobia in Your Mama.

Special celebrity style amenities of the low profile two-story post and beam pad include a massive master suite with two fireplaces and super-sized custom-fitted closet, a fitness/massage room with mirrored walls and naughty cherry red floor, professional screening room with built-in bar and seating for at least 15 movie goers, and–natch–a recording studio.

Many of the mansion's main rooms open to the wide stone terrace and deck that runs the full length of the house and features and outdoor fireplace. Although there's probably too little room to put a pooch through its proper exercise paces, there's plenty of space for more human activities such as sunbathing, eating, sitting around a fire pit, taking in the glitzy carpet of lights that stretch out below the house, and hanging out in an amorphous swinger-friendly 12-seat spa.

MizAguilera married music industry executive Jordan Bratman in the fall of 2005 and it wasn't long before she turned up with a bun in her oven. As is often the case with rich and famous folks, a new baby meant the L.A.-based parents to be needed a new mansion in which to bring up baby.

After a peep and poke around a number of high-priced pads in some of Tinseltown's most expensive zip codes, the then-happy couple settled on a 6 bedroom and 9 bathroom Beverly Hills mansion owned by Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne. Property records and previous reports show the couple shelled out $11,500,000 for the walled and gated estate where a daily parade of buses and vans loaded with camera wielding tourists and super-fans roll slowly by hopin' and prayin' they''ll–what?–catch a glimpse of MizAguilera decked out in a bespangled halter top, Brian Atwood pumps and a face-full of make-up pushing the mower, clipping the hedges or backing out of the driveway?.

In March 2011, six or so months after it was revealed that MizAguilera and and Mister Bratman planned to part ways and dissolve their 5 year marriage, they quietly pushed their decadently decorated Mediterranean mansion in Bev Hills estate on the market with an asking price of $13,500,000. The 10,000 square foot pile remains listed at the same number.

In classic celebrity fashion MizAguilera took up with another man–a smirky production assistant named Matt Rutler–very shortly her split with Mister Bratman. There's talk and gossip that MizAguilera wants to make her rebound romance with Mister Rutler legal in the eyes of God and government but the Gossip Cop says the marriage scuttlebutt aint' nuthin' but "entirely false."

Your Mama, who doesn't know a pig pen from an ink pen, has no idea what MizAguilera's romantic plans my or may not be as regards to Mister Rutler. We do know that with one mansion sold and another on the market the fast-living single mommy needs a new place to live so we fully expect the platinum blond bomb shell will be back in the celebrity real estate headlines before Your Mama can work our way through this elephantine bottle of gin the Dr. Cooter brought home from Costco last week.

In/out, buy this, sell that, buy again, sell again...the real estate merry-go-round of celebrities is a dizzy whirly-gig to say the least. A bit boring finally too. Aside from marrying and divorcing, do they do anything else other than buy and sell houses? It would be nice to have a list from Mama of Tinseltown people who buy and stay put. Not a long list, I would suspect. What about Streep?

Think I would have a bit of work done to level out the living room floor, allowing for better use of the space (wouldn't require rebuilding the FP either). And they can rip out the solitary confinement padded wall while they're at it. That said, the only permanent drawback to the house is the fact you have to hike up a flight of stairs from the front door to reach the living room. That said, this is a very cool house with total privacy... I love it. But wouldn't you know, I just blew through my last $4.7, Damn.

Wish the agents would stop listing this house as having 6500 sq ft...1500 of it is a non permited storage area turned in to a Theatre by MR.Sh....and if he built that with the same attention he builds retaining walls out of plywood (hollywood blvd) well, you would never get me down there to watch a movie..........